An increasing number of people use the World Wide Web for e-commerce as well as for other purposes. These people represent a source of potential consumers that merchants wish to access. Techniques for referring potential customers to merchants benefits both the merchants, by increasing customer traffic, and the customers, by introducing the customers to merchants that provide goods and services the customers desire.
For example, an e-commerce website may pay an affiliate website for providing customer referrals. The e-commerce merchant may wish to draw potential customers to its website and encourage other website operators to link to the e-commerce website through a hyperlink or similar technology. The users that click through one of the links to the e-commerce website may be tracked by the use of a cookie or tracking token. The use of a cookie makes it possible to know which affiliate website directed the potential customer to the e-commerce website. If the potential customer makes a purchase from the e-commerce website, the e-commerce merchant may pay a commission to the affiliate website for being the source of the customer lead. These techniques have proven effective in the realm of e-commerce, and yet generally remain limited to this environment.